The present invention relates to a culturing apparatus that cultures cells.
Japanese Patent Laid-Open No. 2002-262856 discloses an example of a conventional automated cell culture. In a cell culturing apparatus disclosed in this application, an automatic medium exchanging device is provided with an incubator, a medium exchanging robot and a management computer, in order to automatically exchange a medium. The management computer takes out a culture tray, on which cells are cultured, from the incubator to the outside by a carrier robot or the like, discharges a liquid medium in the culture tray with a needle, injects new liquid medium by the needle, and puts the culture tray into the incubator.
Japanese Patent Laid-Open No. 2004-129568 discloses an example of a culture vessel, in a cell culture, that reduces the infection and achieves the effective cell culture with a simple configuration. The culture vessel disclosed in this application has a vessel body whose inside is sterilized and that has a film disposed at its portion and at least one tube that communicates with the inside of this vessel body and is made of a thermally depositable material whose leading end is closed.
The most important subject upon culturing cells are to prevent the cultured cell from being infected by dust, bacteria, virus, or the like. In order to prevent the infection, it is required that a series of processes in the cell culture such as cell seeding or exchange of a medium is performed in a sterilized state so as to prevent contaminants from being entered. A cell culture or processing is currently made by skilled technicians in a cell processing center at a large-scale culture facility composed of sterilized each facility by using a technique provided by GMP (GOOD MANUFACTURING PRACTICE). In this infection management, it is difficult to enhance productivity and reduce cost for industrialization.
In order to eliminate this inconvenience, an automated culturing apparatus disclosed in Japanese Patent Laid-Open No. 2002-262856 has been proposed wherein an operation same in level as that carried out by a skilled technician with a quality retained is possible by using an automated technique. The device disclosed in this application performs cells seeding or exchange of a medium by using a driving device such as a robot arm, so that it requires a clean space or control system considering an operating range of the arm, thereby making the whole device extremely large-scale.
Since a current culture tool such as a culture dish or the like is open to the outer space, safety cannot be assured so long as germs of various sorts in the space around a seeding device are reduced. Therefore, the automated culturing apparatus can only be installed in a facility, the whole of which is sterilized, such as a processing center, so that a large sterilizing system is required to produce a small tissue from cultured cells.
The infection can be prevented by closing the culture space to remove the connection with the outside in order to eliminate such inconvenience, as disclosed in JP2004-129568. A device can be miniaturized by using the culture vessel disclosed in this application, but a perfect closed system makes it difficult to move substances into or from an outer space.